More-ment

My friend Colin McComb is trying to decide what to do next. He’s wrapped his part of the work on Wasteland 2, and some other stuff coming down the pike still leaves him with a bit of spare time on his hands. If I had spare time on my hands, I’d stare at the wall, or fail to clean the house, or watch something I’ve already seen. Colin, on the other hand, might be a bit more productive…

You see, Colin’s been around the block. The dude was instrumental in creating the Planescape universe back when Dungeons & Dragons was still owned by TSR; apparently that achievement was insufficient, so he went into video games and was one of the core designers on Planescape Torment. Maybe you’ve heard of it, given that it’s one of the most revered and admired roleplaying games in the history of the medium. Black Isle’s brilliant, Dickensian meander was a piece of relentless genius.

And now Colin’s thinking that maybe the world could use a little more Torment.

Check out his thoughts on the subject, right here in his blog. But come back! You can come back. You’re not in Planescape Torment, you see. Clicking that link isn’t like passing through a portal in Sigil, the City of Doors, where any threshold can transport you everywhere, where such gates are often one-way, so venturing through might trap you forever in a faraway place that could glitter with all your dreams or cackle and moan with all your nightmares. No, here on the web you can just push the BACK button on your browser.

So Colin is toying with the idea of making another Torment game. Not a D&D license, of course; and not a direct sequel. Possibly, given IP ownership, not even bearing the Torment title. But torment is a state of mind, not a name, and Colin – of all people – knows exactly how to bring it about again.

I remember much from Planescape Torment, but two things stand out in my memory:

First, it was one of the only RPGs I’ve played, to this day, that forced me to think about my decisions. To agonize. And not just in the usual way. The towering moral dilemmas of Mass Effect and The Walking Dead are often just that: moral dilemmas. Do the wrong thing or the right thing, with the decision muddied by your immediate needs.

In Planescape Torment, the decisions were occasionally black and white, but more often, they were not, and many of them seemed rather innocuous at the time. I remember so many conversations where I was presented with three or four (or five, or more) dialogue options, each dense and rippling with meaning, none obviously right or wrong. Sometimes they were just chats, irrelevant but character-building. Other times my life – to whatever degree life mattered for the game’s immortal protagonist – hung on answering correctly. It was brilliant.

It also turned me into a fanboy at the age of 24. Black Isle was in the habit of publishing its employees’ email addresses at the back of the instruction manual, so I sent one to Torment’s Lead Designer Chris Avellone to thank him, and say how much I was enjoying the game. And he wrote back! He wrote back immediately! Chris Fucking Avellone emailed me, and said thank you very much for the note, that it really meant a lot to him, and that he’d shared my message around the office with the rest of the team. Can you believe it?

With strange eons I now live in a world where I know him; where I’ve actually had lunch with him and sat on panels with him and consumed alcohol with him and he’s a Facebook friend. I don’t call him Chris Fucking Avellone any more (just Chris), but I mean come on.

Oh! Third, there’s a talking armoire named Louis in the game. A talking armoire! That lives in a brothel for intellectual lusts. Like literature and stuff.

Since Colin and I both live in the same state we really need to get together for beers more often. But in the interim, he’s asking the world at large what’s next for him, and whether what’s next might be a project that will hopefully bring back the spirit of Torment.

So he asks, what would you want to see?

I’d want to see a setting as strange as Sigil, as surreal yet as clearly lived-in.

I’d want to see characters as memorable, each with a story as tragic – yet occasionally hilarious – as the oddities that populated that 1999 masterpiece. Talking armoire! Floating skull! Retired succubus!

I’d want to see decisions that I had to think about. Not because I was deciding right and wrong, but deciding correct and incorrect.

About the author

Tap-Repeatedly Overlord Steerpike is a games industry journalist and consultant. His earliest memories are of video games, and hopes his last memories will be of them as well. He’s a featured monthly columnist with the International Game Developers Association, and is internationally published in an assortment of dull e-Learning texts and less dull gaming publications. He also lectures on games at various universities.

4 Responses to More-ment

Synonamess Botch12/01/2012

First Person Shooter please. I kid!
Losing the D&D license is a positive, IMHO. That 2nd edition or whatever was the worst part of the game. Can’t say I miss THAC0. If he envisions something other than a straight-up adventure game, some kind of character building system with more flexibility would be welcome. It wasn’t clear to the uninitiated that some of the perhaps lesser used attributes like charisma were the most important.
One thing I enjoyed about Torment was the gradual uncovering of all the complicated, intertwining relationships of the various characters to TNO. It did a great job of revealing and justifying why these people would accompany TNO in the first place, as opposed to “Hey, want to join my party of doom? Sure! My schedule is clear this week.”

I saw that posting! I’m so glad you wrote about it. I didn’t have anything to add, though, on a wishlist… I just want to see the game happen, whatever it turns out to be!

Mike "Scout" Gust12/01/2012

A friend suggested I might want to go with INT and CHAR just as I was picking Torment up for the first time. I still remember being blown away by the amount of story tucked away. I still remember the moment when I realized I wasn’t facing yet another bash and smash with the story taken off the back of a cereal box. I have no idea what I want to see in a new “Torment” as I just read this article. I just want to re-experience that excitement again. It’s been a while. A very, very long while.

Gregg B12/03/2012

I’ll second what you’ve all said.

The worst part of Torment for me was all the horrible stats and XP and leveling and D&D nonsense. Get out of the way, that’s not what this is about. It’s about the story and the characters and the world and your journey and the decisions you make. It felt so mechanical and totally at odds with everything else that Torment did so, so well. I’d like to see less of a reliance on abstract numbers to communicate progress and development and specialisation.

@Steerpike: Why am I not your friend on Facebook? I thought we were like real friends dude. You cut me deep Matt, DEEP.